Samsung’s cancer-stricken workers are focus of fresh debate in South Korea

New movie tells story of 20-year-old who got leukemia—but no compensation.

Workers in Samsung semiconductor plants who have developed cancer are fighting their former employer—and their government—for compensation.

Their fight has become a very public controversy in Korea, where two new movies tell the stories of young female workers who got cancer while working in Samsung chip factories. The workers' families have been trying to use Korean courts to obtain compensation for seven years without success. The story of those workers, and the unprecedented public debate about the dark side of Samsung, is detailed in a feature story published today by Bloomberg Businessweek.

As the story notes, many Koreans "revere" Samsung Group, as its companies contribute a stunning 24 percent of their nation’s GDP. In 1961, South Korea was a war-torn country with a GDP less than Sudan or Sierra Leone. Today it’s the world’s 15th-largest economy.

One of the movies, Another Promise, is in wide release despite a shoestring, largely crowdsourced, budget. It’s “a meaningful achievement in Korean cinema, as well as for Korean democracy,” wrote the Korea Herald.

Another Promise tells the story of Hwang Yu-Mi, who left home for the first time when she went to live in a dormitory attached to Samsung's Giheung factory, about 20 miles south of Seoul. Unable to afford university, the job was a good one for her. "I was very happy, because Samsung is one of the best companies in Korea," her father told Businessweek.

Throughout her eight-hour shifts, Yu-mi was exposed to a battery of potentially dangerous chemicals, fumes, and ionizing radiation, a panel of Korean court judges later found. One of her co-workers in wet etching, Lee Suk-young, had developed skin irritations that required her to get regular medical treatment.

In October of 2005, she called her father, saying that she felt "nauseous, dizzy, and was vomiting." She was soon hospitalized. At the age of 20, Yu-mi had acute myeloid leukemia, one of the cancers "most clearly caused by exposure to carcinogens," notes Businessweek.

Hwang Yu-mi died in 2007. Lee Suk-young, her co-worker with the skin irritation, was diagnosed with the same disease in 2006 and died within 5 weeks.

Now their families have joined a group of workers and relatives called Banolim, which is fighting for compensation from the government with mixed success. Banolim says it has found 58 cases of leukemia and other blood-related cancers in Samsung plants.

Despite the fact that two young women in the same work unit had died of the same disease, the company insists their deaths were unconnected to work. In the report, Yu-mi's father described a visit by Samsung executives:

“They didn’t ask me about Yu-mi’s condition,” Hwang says. “The four of them were raising their voices against me.” The executives, Hwang says, insisted that his daughter’s “disease has no relationship with Samsung, so ‘Why are you blaming Samsung?’”

Korea's workers compensation system operates similarly to that in the US. It's "modest, covering medical bills, lost wages, and funeral expenses," writes Businessweek. It's not required to demonstrate employer negligence to get benefits.

The families of Hwang and Lee ultimately won compensation in 2011, but the government—which worked together with Samsung lawyers to fight the case—is appealing. The families continue to await a final decision.

Samsung's only official response to Another Promise came on a company blog post, translated and published by Businessweek.

"A movie is a movie," wrote a senior Samsung executive who admitted his own daughter was moved to tears when she saw the film. "It is not right to distort the truth… I know how hard the company and the workers try to provide a safe environment, so I do not doubt the safety of my workplace.”